VCP Day - “How do we sustain the work done by VCP and its partners when VCP comes to an end in June 2024?”

The Inclusive Violence and Crime Prevention (VCP) Programme hosted its annual partner workshop   recently in Pretoria.

This year’s VCP Day was framed by one question in particular, “How do we sustain the work done by VCP and its partners when VCP comes to an end in June 2024?” This question of sustainability and capturing the impacts of the programme over the past eleven years characterised the conversations and questions that arose throughout the day.

VCP is a BMZ-commissioned project, co-funded since October 2021 by Global Affairs Canada (GAC), that promotes the improvement of the framework conditions required to implement South Africa’s comprehensive national (gender-based) violence prevention strategies on a local level through inclusive partnerships.

Core implementation partners, such as the Department of Cooperative Governance, the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service (CSPS), the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, the South African Local Government Association, the Department of Basic Education, the South African Cities Network, the Violence Prevention Forum, and various civil society and municipal partners, were amongst the partners in attendance on the day.

VCP long-term gender consultant, Tanya Jacobs, briefly introduced the workshop to the topic of gender-transformative and intersectional approaches in violence prevention. These are major themes characterising VCP III and its work to support the implementation of the Integrated Crime and Violence Prevention Strategy (ICVPS), and the National Strategic Plan on GBVF (NSP).

She explained how important it is to frame VCP's collaborative work along the gender continuum to understand to what degree gender-inequality is addressed at its roots, especially with the staggering rates of gender-based violence that plague South Africa and patriarchal gender norms as a core cause.

Beginning with a marketplace style presentation, partners had the initial opportunity to browse through the various boards about key activities of the VCP programme, before entering deep dive conversations and debates at their identified points of interest. The discussions were centred around the three broad areas of intervention in which VCP operates: children and youth, municipal and urban safety, knowledge and evidence management, and policy implementation support. This gave partners an opportunity to engage with topics, interventions, results, planned activities and other partners they would not ordinarily engage with.

The deep dives provided an environment that fostered critical and honest analysis of the current state of not only VCP, but the crime and violence prevention sector in the country at large.

The VCP Programme has placed a particular focus on a “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach to violence and crime prevention. Discussions on localising policy and GBV prevention examined how valuable it is to ensure that the ground level activity initiated by civil society be resourced and capacitated effectively and ensure that NGO voices influence policy and high-level decision making. An honest conversation also ensued about the response to gaps in the NSP that have hindered implementation, revealing this as an environment for professionals with a common focus on violence and crime prevention to share their shortcomings, successes, and lessons with colleagues.  

“We need to fund things that work”, an important statement made by CSPS representative, Lillian Mashele. It summarised well the discussions around how to ensure evidence-informed work is implemented at local level. By the same token, partners emphasised that in order to avoid repetition of action and knowledge production, there needs to be improved integration of resources, departments, engagements, and implementation; and professionals focused on monitoring, evaluation, and reporting need to be enhanced. Moreover, on the conversation of integration, a question was brought up on how we go about bringing together prevention with response?

At the Area-Based Violence Prevention Initiative (ABVPI) discussion, a different but somewhat overlapping conversation was taking place. Lesego Daphney Tshuwa of The World Bank, Carmel Rawhani of the KfW, and other partners agreed that to begin to insert ourselves in each other’s spaces, to avoid a circular knowledge pool and the above-mentioned recapitulation of work and information, was a necessity. This included academic spaces, influencing curriculum, and packaging information correctly to have traction at different levels. Although a component of the municipal and urban safety discussion and not policy, this group emphasized that a gap in policy (even spatially) reflects a gap in knowledge; reminding us again that although VCP's work is grouped in areas of intervention, these areas act as Venn diagrams with overlapping relationships.

The day ended with a ‘World Café’ style pathway cafe of discussions on resourcing, relationship building and networking, capacity building, generating awareness and advocacy, and preserving knowledge. The discussions focused on how certain tasks and important functions performed by the VCP programme can continue beyond June 2024, and who would be responsible for them, bringing about both questions and answers.

“Excited” “Informed” “Connected” and “Ready!” were some of the key themes that emerged as partners provided feedback on the day's deliberations.

The VCP team trusts and hopes that these words underpin the work that is still to be done before the end of VCP in June 2024, and most importantly, sustain the important work that VCP and the partners has been able to contribute to violence and crime prevention sector beyond VCP.

Written by Linda Dlamini, VCP.